Elcom Systems has announced that the Humber & North Yorkshire Procurement Collaborative has adopted its spend management platform to save an estimated £15 million per year.

The collaborative delivers procurement and supply chain services to: Hull University Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust, Northern Lincolnshire and Google NHS Foundation Trust and York and Scarborough Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust. The three trusts consolidated their procurement processes into one operation in July 2022, with the legal introduction of Integrated Care Systems.

The three northeastern trusts are now predicting that the single technology system from Elcom will see multi-million-pound procurement savings of over £15m per year, within five years.

The spend management platform will be introducing new technologies to the collective. This includes sourcing software for quicker supplier quotations, integrated procurement software that will interface with finance programmes, inventory management with the ability to transfer stock between hospitals and product catalogues shared across systems.

Edd James, director of Procurement at the collaborative, hopes that the three trusts can reduce the 266,000 invoices that are currently received, improving efficiency and minimising accounting costs.

He said: “… some of our suppliers are sending us ten thousand invoices per year, each of which has to be individually dealt with. Better systems will improve the ordering process, avoid duplications, provide better information and reduce ordering and invoicing requirements.

“It’s also urgent that we get our teams across the trusts working together as one. We’re introducing standardised governance as well as systems, so the procurement operations can coordinate their activity and work together. That will in turn improve our purchasing power and allow us to negotiate prices with our suppliers.”

With a single cloud-based procurement solution, the collaborative can also standardise processes as well as gain visibility of requirements across the trusts. As a result purchasing power should be improved and cost savings can be driven down.

Ahead of the deployment of the tech, Humber & North Yorkshire Procurement Collaborative gained references from other Elcom clients, including the Scottish Government, North Central London NHS and South West London NHS.

Ian Slaughter, VP of product at Elcom, said: “The introduction of the ICS model offers health trusts the opportunity to bring procurement and supply chain functions together to assist in driving efficiency…

“Our work with the Humber & North Yorkshire Procurement Collaborative will offer further demonstrations of how sourcing, procurement and inventory software can be delivered to save NHS Trusts considerable amounts of time and money – allowing resources to be better dedicated to the treatment of patients.”